My takeaway:
The curiosity within the theater industry about Smash 2.0, as Greenblatt calls it, was intense. A friend of mine who attended the workshop said: “Usually, you run away from these things, but everybody was fighting to get a ticket. And we lapped it up. There was huge affection for it. We recognized ourselves and this ridiculous life we lead.”
But Greenblatt and Meron didn’t trust an audience of insiders. They distributed plenty of free tickets to “civilians,” as theater people call those unfortunate souls who don’t happen to be in show business. The civilians, who filled out surveys, loved it too. Except the ending, which they hated. No revelations here, but let’s just say Smash took a dark turn. It was “a swing,” Rodriguez said with admiration. But the audience wasn’t having it. “There was a backlash,” Hurder recalled.
So Martin and Elice did what theater writers do when “the wind blows you in a different direction” and you don’t want to end up in the kitchen at Joe Allen: They rewrote the final scene.
Smash now ends on an upbeat note. But the show is not a sappy love letter to the theater. Martin and Elice have knocked around Shubert Alley too long to stoop to that. They were once up against each other for the Tony Award for best book: Martin for The Drowsy Chaperone, Elice for Jersey Boys. Martin won. “Sometimes he brings his Tony Award with him when we write, just to remind me,” Elice said.
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